There are various alternative theories about the origins of Hungarian, but these are dismissed by most linguists owing to a lack of evidence:

Hungarian has been claimed to be closely related to Hunnish, since Hungarian legends and histories show close ties between the two peoples, and both the Huns and the modern day Hunnish people (Székely) lived in Hungary. However, the link with Hunnish is uncertain.

The passive voice is almost extinct (it can be found in old literary texts).

Many grammatical and syntactic functions, elements and constructions are based on suffixes. The mark for the plural of a noun is a suffixed -k, preceded by a vowel if the word ends in a consonant. Usually, vowels are inserted between the word and its suffix to prevent a buildup of consonants (and hence to prevent unpronouncable words).

Hungarian is written using a variant of the Latin alphabet. Hungarian has a phonemic orthography. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several additional letters. These include letters with acute accents (á,é,í,ó,ú) which represent long vowels, the diaereses ö and ü and their long counterparts ő (unicode Ő and ő) and ű (unicode Ű and ű). Sometimes ô or õ is used for ő and û for ű due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 codepage. Hungarian can be properly represented with the Latin-2 / ISO-8859-2 codepage, but this codepage is not always available. (Hungarian is the only language using the ő and ű codes.) Of course Unicode includes the glyphs, and they therefore can be used on the internet.

Additionally, the letter pairs <ny>, <ty>, and <gy> represent the palatal consonants /ñ/, /tj/, and /gj/ (like the "dy" sound in British "duke" or American "would you").
Hungarian uses <s> for /S/ and <sz> for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish. is /Z/ and <cs> is /tS/. All these digraphs are considered single letters. is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like <j> (English <y>), and mostly appears in old words. More exotic letters are <dz> and <dzs> /dZ/. They are hard to find even in a longer text. Two examples are madzag; edzeni (rope; to train) and dzsungel (jungle).

Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, where the long vowels are written with accents, and between long consonants and short consonants, where the long consonants are written double. The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs: +=. Usually a trigraph is a double digraph, but there are a few exceptions: tizennyolc "eighteen" is tizen + nyolc. There are doubling minimal pairs: tizenegyedik (eleventh) vs. tizennegyedik (fourteenth).

Primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. There is sometimes secondary stress on other syllables, especially when two words have been combined (like "viszontlátásra" (see you later) pronounced "VEES-ohnt-LAH-tahsh-raw").

While it seems unusual to English speakers at first, once one learns the new orthography and pronunciations, Hungarian is nearly totally phonetic.

hello: szia ['sia] (informal) (sounds almost exactly like American "see ya") But you only say this to people that you know well. When you address a stranger you use the more formal "good day": jó napot (kivánok) (YOnahpot)